The male beard as proof of God

Why are men's beards so perfectly shaped? Most men have beard growing only in very defined areas on the face. It doesn't go all the way up to the ears, but instead there is an narrow area around the ear that's beard free. Below the eyes and down to the center of the cheeks there is no beard, and in two little patches below the mouth there isn't any either. Also nothing on the nose, forehead, or temples. Check out the pictures below.

What I truly don't understand is why the creationists haven't latched on to this curious fact of the shape of the male beard. It's the ultimate God of the gaps argument: The male beard is so perfectly shaped and so obviously designed that the Darwinists will never find a way to explain it. For what could possible be the advantage of having beard where men do, but not in those other areas? It's clearly cleverly designed to make men look as stunning as they do.

If anyone ever seriously advances the beautiful beard argument, I want full credit and cash payments every time it's used.

For one, not every man's beard connects or look as perfect as the examples you give. Some are very splotchy and not always full. Second, we are so familiar with how a beard looks we consider it perfectly shaped. However, if all men's beard also included some of the areas like the nose, forehead, or temples and that is the only vision of a beard that we knew, wouldn't we also consider that perfect?

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.